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Thursday, January 21, 2016

Pat Buchanan: Is the Spectre of Trump Haunting Davos?

At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites
that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has
provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues
peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.”

Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in the
third parties arising across Europe, and in the U.S. primaries.

But set aside Joe’s slurs — demagogues, xenophobia.

Who really belongs in the dock here? Who caused this crisis of political legitimacy now gripping the nations of the West?

Was it Donald Trump, who gives voice to the anger of those who
believe themselves to have been betrayed? Or the elites who betrayed
them?

Can that crowd at Davos not understand that it is despised because it
is seen as having subordinated the interests of the nations and people
in whose name it presumes to speak, to advance an agenda that serves,
first and foremost, its own naked self-interest?

The political and economic elites of Davos have grow rich, fat and
powerful by setting aside patriotism and sacrificing their countries on
the altars of globalization and a New World Order.

“[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag
the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the
economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the
delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our
people, and disregard or diminish our national interest and national
sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will
probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the
better.”

What we saw through a glass darkly then, we now see face to face.

Is not Trump the personification of the populist-nationalist revolt Francis predicted?

And was it not presidents and Congresses of both parties who mired us
in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and negotiated
the trade deals that have gutted American industry?

The bleeding of factories and manufacturing jobs abroad has produced
the demoralization and decline of our middle class, along with the wage
stagnation and shrinking participation in the labor force.

Is Trump responsible for that? Is Socialist Bernie Sanders, who voted against all those trade deals?

If not, who did this to us?

Was it not the Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats?

Americans never supported mass immigration.

It was against their will that scores of millions, here legally and
illegally, almost all from Third World countries, whose masses have
never been fully assimilated into any western nation, have poured into
the USA.

Who voted for that?

Religious, racial, cultural diversity has put an end to the “bad” old
America we grew up in, as we evolve into the “universal nation” of Ben
Wattenberg, who once rhapsodized, “The non-Europeanization of America is
heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.”

James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyite and Cold War geostrategist whose
work Francis admired, called liberalism “the ideology of Western
suicide.”

If the West embraces, internalizes and operates on the principles of
liberalism, Burnham wrote, the West with meet an early death.

Among the dogmas of liberalism is the unproven assumption that
peoples of all nationalities, tribes, cultures, creeds can coexist
happily in nations, especially in a “creedal” nation like the USA, which
has no ethnic core but rather is built upon ideas.

A corollary is that “diversity,” a new America and new Europe where
all nations are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural and
multilingual, is the future of the west and the model for mankind.

Yet, large and growing minorities in every country of Europe, and now
in America, believe that not only is this proposition absurd, the end
result could be national suicide.

And when one considers the millions who are flocking to Trump and
Sanders, it is hard to believe that the establishments of the two
parties, even if they defeat these challengers, can return to same old
interventionist, trade, immigration and war policies.

For Trump is not the last of the populist-nationalists.

Given his success, other Republicans will emulate him. Already, other
candidates are incorporating his message. The day Francis predicted was
coming appears to have arrived.

Angela Merkel may have been Time’s Person of the Year in 2016, but
she will be lucky to survive in office in 2017, if she does not stop the
invasion from Africa and the Middle East.

Yet Joe Biden’s dismissal that it is reactionaries who oppose what
the progressives of Davos believe is not entirely wrong. For as Georges
Bernanos wrote, when Europe was caught between Bolshevism and fascism:

To be a reactionary means simply to be alive, because only a corpse does not react any more — against the maggots teeming on it.

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